Despite the continuing debate, email marketing is here to stay as a viable form of inbound marketing. It has huge potential to not only help you turn leads into customers but also build a rapport with your target audience. That said, your time and your budget—it’s safe to assume—is limited, so you want to choose your strategies wisely. One smart way to get better results (and more revenue) from your email marketing campaigns is segmentation. Segmentation speaks to the fact that 1) your buyers aren’t all the same and 2) they aren’t all at the same point in the sales cycle. It’s one of those email marketing best practices that deserves a place toward the top your to-do list starting now, and here’s why:
1. Everyone else is doing it (or wishes they were).
While this reason didn’t work when we were kids, it stands now. You’re competing with others in your industry to get the attention of your email subscribers, and more and more marketers are using segmentation to send targeted messages to groups within their lists. And the fact is that non-segmented email sends just can’t compete with segmented email sends (and we’ve got the data to prove it—just keep on reading, friend).
2. Your subscribers expect it.
People expect messages that are tailored to them, and they’re savvy about cutting the clutter to receive the information that matters most to them. They want tailored content, and segmenting helps you give them what they want.
3. Relevance.
Because of all the choices available to your subscribers, it’s uber-important to center on relevance, and segmentation is all about relevance. It’s about delivering compelling content to your buyers at the right time. It helps narrow your focus and, as a result, cuts down on unsubscribe rates.
Relevance also affects the trust you build (or don’t build) with your subscribers. If they’re hitting delete every time they get one of your emails because your content doesn’t speak to them, they will quickly unsubscribe in order to pay attention to emails that are relevant to them. On the flip side, if you consistently deliver content that speaks to your subscribers in a specific way using segmentation, you’ll get a good reputation as a company that provides useful information that they need and soon they’ll be watching for your emails to hit their inbox.
4. Segmenting your list will increase your open & click rates.
This reason isn’t purely anecdotal. There’s a lot of research out there to back it up, including recent research by MailChimp on the effects of list segmentation on email marketing stats. They found that segmented email campaigns got 14.72% more opens and 62.84% more clicks than non-segmented campaigns. Regardless of what you think of the previous three reasons, it’s clear that segmenting your email lists has a positive impact on subscriber engagement, and that’s a good enough reason for us.
Are you now convinced that you’ll get the most out of your email marketing campaign by segmenting your email marketing lists? Then, it’s time to check out some segmentation strategies. Not all segmentation yields the same results. There are numerous creative ways to segment your list and many things to consider when deciding which strategy will work best for your business.
Are you jazzed up to get started with email segmentation but feeling like you need a little help? Or maybe you’ve segmented your lists, but you’re not sure how to create compelling email messages for each of your segments. Get in touch with us to learn about our email marketing services and how we can help you meet your business’s goals.
If you have another reason for why segmentation is more important that ever that we haven’t included here, share it below in the comments section. We’d also love to hear about your successes with email marketing segmentation and what strategies you’ve found useful.
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